Garden Grabbing

Bob Neill, Shadow Local Government & Planning Minister, has announced that the Conservatives will stop gardens up and down "the country" being concreted over:

The practice of “garden grabbing”, where developers build homes or blocks of flats on back gardens, is dramatically changing the character of many suburban areas throughout the UK, leading to high levels of unsustainable development and increasing housing densities in areas previously characterised as leafy suburbs. Some figures suggest that over 180,000 buildings have been put on back gardens in the last five years.

Bob implies that the 180,000 figure relates to the UK. However, the figures actually come from councils' responses to a Government survey of 42 local authorities, covering a seventh of England's population.

Findings of the survey, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show that between 2003 and 2008, the councils granted planning permission for 26,688 new homes on land which was previously occupied by houses and their front and back gardens.

The amount is a net total – for instance, if one large Edwardian house is replaced with a block of ten flats, it would count as nine new homes in the figures.

The survey totals equate to a figure of 186,000 new homes in England as a whole – 102 a day – or 210,000 for the UK.

So although he mentions the UK and doesn't mention England, Bob's article on Garden Grabbing is about England. And any Tory change to the legislation will affect England (and may also apply to Wales).

Credit where credit is due though. Where Bob fails, at least Caroline Spelman gets it correct:

The only people who are not losing out from the rush to develop back gardens are the developers and land speculators. For them, England is literally becoming a treasure island. Right now, land agents may be putting this Bill and my speech on their website in a bid to convince people speculatively to buy plots of land in the expectation of being granted planning permission.